Facilities Request Management: From Broken Chairs to Keys

Facilities request management works best when every request records where (building, floor, room), what (a small set of categories like repairs, cleaning, access and supplies) and how urgent — with health-and-safety issues skipping the queue entirely. Requests that need a contractor are tracked through to the vendor's visit, recurring maintenance is scheduled rather than waiting for things to break, and location data turns the request history into a map of where the building needs attention.

Why facilities needs a request process

Facilities requests usually arrive by stopping someone in a corridor or messaging whoever is known to "sort things out". The results are familiar: a broken light reported five times by five people, a leak nobody logged until it damaged the ceiling, a new starter without a desk key on day one. The same structure that fixes IT requests fixes these — one front door, an owner, a deadline — with a few facilities-specific additions. For the general idea, see what is an internal request desk.

Category	Examples	Type	Starting target
Safety issue	Exposed wiring, leak near electrics, broken lock on an exit	Incident	Immediate — phone, not queue
Something's broken	Meeting-room screen, chair, light, blinds	Incident	2 business days
Heating, cooling, air	Too hot, too cold, stuffy room	Incident	1 business day
Cleaning	Spill, washroom supplies, kitchen	Service request	Same day
Access and keys	Badge, desk key, parking	Service request	2 business days; before start dates
Moves and desks	New desk, moving teams, furniture	Service request	5–10 business days
Supplies	Stationery, kitchen, printer paper	Service request	3 business days

Location on every request

The single most useful field in facilities is location. Make it structured — building, floor, room or area from a pick-list — rather than free text. It gives you:

Faster work: the person fixing it knows where to go.
Duplicate detection: three "light out" requests for Floor 2, Room 204 on the same day are one job.
Patterns: a room with a heating complaint every week has a heating problem, not a complaining occupant.

A QR code on each meeting-room door that opens the request form with the room pre-filled makes reporting take seconds and makes the location always right.

A facilities request form template (and a spreadsheet version)

The fields that make a facilities request actionable, as a form or as the columns of an Excel or Google Sheets tracker:

Location      building / floor / room or area (pick-list)
Category      from the short list above
What's wrong  one or two sentences
Photo         optional, one or two
Urgency       safety issue / stops work today / can wait
Needed by     a date, for moves, keys and access
Contact       who to ask, and when they are in

For a tracker, add the columns the facilities team fills in: ID, date received, assigned to, vendor, status (new, in progress, waiting on vendor, done), made safe at, fixed on, and "requester confirmed". A sheet like this is fine for a small office; it stops working when several people need to see status at once or you want reminders and a history.

A planned-maintenance schedule needs even less: a task, how often (set by your local rules and the manufacturer's guidance), the owner, when it was last done and when it is next due. Sorting by "next due" makes the week's jobs the top of the list.

Photos

A photo attached to "the tap in the second-floor kitchen is leaking" saves a trip to look. Allow one or two photos per request and store them in object storage rather than the database. Ask people not to photograph other people.

Safety issues skip the queue

Health-and-safety issues must never wait behind a stationery order. Make the path explicit:

A Safety issue category that immediately notifies the facilities lead by phone or push notification, not just the queue.
A visible instruction on the form: "If someone is in danger, call [number] first."
A record of when it was made safe, not just when it was fully fixed.

The escalation mechanics are the same as for IT; see the help desk escalation matrix.

Vendor and contractor work

Many facilities jobs are done by outside contractors. Track them on the request so the requester still sees progress:

Status for "waiting on vendor", with the vendor's name and visit date.
Internal notes for quotes, purchase-order numbers and access arrangements, hidden from the requester.
Confirmation after the visit — ask the requester whether it's actually fixed before closing.
Agreements with regular vendors on response times, just like agreements between internal teams; see SLA vs OLA vs KPI.

Planned maintenance

Not everything should wait to break. Recurring jobs — fire-alarm tests, filter changes, deep cleans, equipment servicing — can be scheduled as recurring tasks with checklists and owners. The request history helps decide what to add: if the same air-conditioning unit generates a complaint every month, a service visit every quarter may be cheaper.

Access, keys and new starters

Access requests are where facilities and IT overlap. A new starter needs a building badge, perhaps a desk key and parking — on day one. Fold these into the onboarding request so they're prepared with the laptop, and into offboarding so badges come back. See the IT onboarding checklist and the offboarding checklist.

A worked example: one leak, handled well

Tuesday 08:40 — Ravi scans the QR code on the second-floor kitchen door and reports: "Water dripping from the ceiling near the fridge." He attaches a photo. The form has the location pre-filled; he picks Safety issue because the fridge is plugged in beneath the drip.

08:41 — the facilities lead gets a push notification, not just a queue item.
08:55 — she isolates the fridge's socket and puts a bucket down. The request records made safe at 08:55.
09:30 — the building's plumbing contractor is called; the request moves to waiting on vendor with a visit booked for 14:00. Ravi can see that.
15:10 — the contractor replaces a failed joint in the pipe above. The facilities lead adds an internal note with the contractor's job number and cost, and asks Ravi to confirm the drip has stopped.
Wednesday 09:00 — Ravi confirms; the request closes.

Three weeks later, the location report shows two more "ceiling" requests on the same floor. That's a pattern worth a survey of the pipework — something no one would have noticed from hallway conversations.

Communicating with the whole building

Some facilities work affects everyone: a lift out of service, the water shut off for maintenance, the heating being repaired. Treat these like IT outages — one notice to everyone, with what's affected, what to do meanwhile, and when the next update comes — so the queue doesn't fill with twenty reports of the same lift. The templates in IT outage communication work unchanged.

Facilities management best practices, in short

Capture a structured location on every request.
Keep the category list short, and give safety its own path that skips the queue.
Track contractor jobs to the visit and confirm the fix with the requester before closing.
Schedule recurring maintenance instead of waiting for failures, and use the request history to decide what to schedule.
Tell the whole building once when something affects everyone.
Review the data monthly: where requests come from, what repeats, and how fast safety issues were made safe.

Metrics that help

Requests by location — a heat map of where the building needs attention.
Requests by category per month — seasonal patterns (heating in winter, cooling in summer) help planning.
Time to make safe for safety issues, separate from time to fix.
Repeat requests for the same location and category within 30 days — fixes that didn't hold.
Vendor response time against what was agreed.

FAQ

What is facilities request management?

A process for receiving, routing and tracking workplace requests — repairs, cleaning, access, moves, supplies — so each has an owner, a location, a status and a deadline.

What information should a facilities request include?

The location (building, floor, room), a category, a description, optionally a photo, and for access or moves, the date it's needed by.

How should safety issues be handled?

Through a dedicated category that notifies the facilities lead immediately by phone or push, with clear instructions to call emergency services first if anyone is in danger.

Should facilities and IT use the same request system?

Often yes: one front door for employees, separate queues behind it, with cross-team requests like onboarding split into linked parts.

What are facilities management best practices?

Record a structured location on every request, keep a short category list, give safety issues a path that skips the queue, track contractor work through to a confirmed fix, schedule recurring maintenance, and review requests by location and category each month to find what keeps repeating. The sections above cover each in turn.

Can I manage facilities requests in a spreadsheet?

For a small office, yes. Use the form fields as columns and add status, assignee, vendor, made-safe and fixed dates, and whether the requester confirmed. It becomes unreliable when several people edit it, when you need reminders and deadlines, or when safety issues must reach someone immediately. Move to a request desk then.